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The Oversight Board has agreed to review a case related to Meta’s handling of election content in Brazil. In a statement, the board said they planned to scrutinize the social network’s policies surrounding election content in “high-risk” areas.

The case stems from a user who posted a video in early January calling for people to “besiege” Brazil’s congress following the election of President Lula da Silva. The video also featured clips of a speech from a Brazilian general, who called for people to go into the streets and government buildings. The video was reported seven times by four different users, according to the board, but remained on Facebook even after it was reviewed by five separate moderators. Meta later opted to remove the post and issue a “strike” to the person who had originally posted it, following the Oversight Board’s decision to review the case.

Though the case is related to Brazil’s most recent presidential election, the board’s recommendations could have a more-far reaching impact. “The Board selected this case to examine how Meta moderates election-related content, and how it is applying its Crisis Policy Protocol in a designated ‘temporary high-risk location,’” the group wrote in a statement.

As the board points out, Meta’s “Crisis Policy Protocol,” is a central aspect of the case. The protocol, which was created after the Oversight board weighed in on the suspension of Donald Trump, allows Meta to respond to situations when there is a risk of “imminent harm” either offline or online. So any recommendations that address that policy could end up affecting election-related content around the world, not just in Brazil.

However, that outcome is still months away. For now, the Oversight Board is asking for public feedback on various issues associated with the case before it makes recommendations to Meta. The company will then have 60 days to respond, though, as usual, Meta is not required to adopt policy changes suggested by the board.

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Bing has crossed 100 million daily active users a month after the launch of its chatbot AI, according to Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's VP for Modern Life, Search and Devices. He said the company is fully aware that it's still just "a small, low, single digit share player," but hey, there was a time when Bing wasn't even a part of the conversation. Now, after the tech giant released its next-gen version, even those who haven't used it in the past are relying on it for their searches: Mehdi noted that one-third of Bing's daily active users are new to the search engine.

"We see this appeal of the new Bing as a validation of our view that search is due for a reinvention and of the unique value proposition of combining Search + Answers + Chat + Creation in one experience," the VP said. 

In addition to seeing a boost in numbers, Microsoft is also apparently enjoying a growth in engagement, with more people conducting more searches. The company credits two factors for that particular victory, the first being Edge's growth in usage, most likely aided by the addition of Bing's chat AI as a new feature. It also said that the introduction of its Prometheus AI model made Bing's search results more relevant, so people have been using — or at least trying out — the search engine more. 

Apparently, around one third of Bing's daily preview users have been using its chat AI for their queries every day. On average, Microsoft is seeing three chats per session, with over 45 million chats since it introduced the new Bing. Further, in 15 percent of all chat sessions, people have been using Bing to generate new content. The launch of Bing's AI chatbot on mobile has propelled the search engine to a new level of popularity, as well, and has led to a six-time increase in daily active users from before it became available. 

By integrating an AI chatbot into Bing earlier this year, Microsoft gave its search engine the weapon it needs to be able to compete against Google. That said, Google does have plans to launch a chatbot of its own and introduced a chat AI called Bard last month. Bard spouted misinformation during its unofficial debut, but Google is working with employees to improve the chatbot's responses before it becomes available.

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Nothing, Forever, an AI-generated livestream inspired by Seinfeld is back on Twitch after being taken offline for an anti-LGBTQ outburst, Gizmodo has reported. After launching in December, the show (from Mismatch Media) became internet-famous for its Seinfeld-adjacent plots, janky '90s-era video game style animation and terrible (though coherent) dialogue. However, it was pulled over a month ago after violating Twitch's conduct policy banning hate speech around sexual and gender identity.

In the most notorious incident, the AI lead character ("Larry"), went on an offensive rant. "I’m thinking about doing a bit about how being transgender is actually a mental illness. Or how all liberals are secretly gay and want to impose their will on everyone. Or something about how transgender people are ruining the fabric of society. But no one is laughing, so I’m going to stop."

Shortly afterwards, Mismatch Media cofounder Skyler Hartle explained that the problem started when its OpenAI GPT-3 Davinci model stopped working correctly. The team switched to Davinci's predecessor Curie, believing that OpenAI's content moderation was still active — which was apparently not the case. The offensive outbursts started shortly afterwards.

"We mistakenly believed that we were leveraging OpenAI’s content moderation system for their text generation models. We are working now to implement OpenAI’s content moderation API (it’s a tool we can use to verify the safeness of the content) before we go live again, and investigating secondary content moderation systems as redundancies," the team said. 

Problems of moderation and offensive content have plagued AI chatbots since they arrived. Microsoft has experienced it twice, first with its Tay chatbot that turned racist, and later with the Bing Chat search assistant powered by OpenAI tech. The latter was pulled for a time after it started insulting users and outputting incorrect information, while insisting it was right. 

Nothing, Forever seems to be working as before, with the same laugh track, engaged viewers (around 3,500 currently) and complete disregard for collision detection — but no offensive outbursts so far. While nothing in the show makes any sense, the fact that AI can generate all the elements in real time is impressive.

After a lengthy drought, Advance Wars-style strategy games are enjoying something of a resurgence. On April 21st, Nintendo will release Advance Wars 1+2 Re-Boot Camp, a remake of the two Game Boy Advance games that started the series. It turns out strategy fans can also look forward to a new Wargroove title, with publisher Chucklefish announcing a sequel to the Advance Wars-inspired game from 2019.

Wargroove 2 doesn’t have a release date yet, but when the game is ready, it will be available on Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam. This time around, Robotality, a studio best known for its work on 2019’s Pathway, is handling development duties. According to the Wargroove 2’s Steam page, the sequel will feature new factions and units for players to command, as well as three single-player campaigns to complete. Chucklefish is also promising a roguelike mode. Additionally, the game will ship with an enhanced level editor that will allow players to create their own maps, cutscenes and campaigns.

If you haven’t played the original game yet, Wargroove is currently 70 percent off on Steam. That’s the largest discount Chucklefish has ever offered on the game.

When Google shut down Stadia in January, it also wound down third-party access to the underlying cloud gaming technology. Google's Jack Buser tellsAxios' Stephen Totilo his company is no longer offering Immersive Stream for Games as it was "tied to Stadia itself." A provider can't simply pick up the pieces, to put it another way.

Only a handful of brands ever used Immersive Stream, and then mainly as a promotional tool. AT&T let mobile subscribers play Batman: Arkham Knight and Control, while Capcom offered a Resident Evil Village demo that saved curious gamers the hassle of a download. Even Peloton used the tech to bring a fitness game, Lanebreak, to its stationary bikes.

We've asked Google for comment. The company isn't completely ignoring cloud gaming, but it's now relegating itself to support. As the firm's Jack Buser tells Axios in an interview, the focus now is on supporting others' Destiny-style live service games by providing a server platform, data management and analytics. Developers may not need to invest as much in online infrastructure, or worry about scaling as their player bases grow. Niantic, Ubisoft and Unity are among the existing customers.

The Immersive Stream shutdown isn't surprising. While it didn't require Stadia's heavily subscription-driven model it suffered from the same limitations as many game streaming services. You needed a fast, stable internet connection, and you still had to contend with increased lag and reduced visual quality compared to a locally-stored game. That limited the appeal, particularly for gamers with sufficiently powerful PCs and consoles.

At the same time, the closure limits the industry's choices. There's no longer a true turnkey cloud gaming option. Companies either have to build their own platforms or bring their games to existing services like GeForce Now. As such, it might be a while before you see more AT&T- or Capcom-style forays.

NVIDIA video card owners already have the luxury of video upscaling in Chrome or Edge, but what if you have an AMD board? Microsoft thinks it can help. It's testing a Video Super Resolution feature in Edge Canary that upscales and removes artifacts on web videos below 720p using both AMD- and NVIDIA-powered GPUs (sorry, Intel Arc fans). You'll need at least a GeForce RTX 20 series or Radeon RX5700, but this could help if you're watching an ancient YouTube video or want to save bandwidth on a capped data plan.

There are some conditions. This is only for Windows users, for a start. You have to plug in if you're using a laptop, and the video can't use a digital rights management (DRM) system like PlayReady or Widevine. At present, you'll also have to force Edge to use your dedicated GPU if your laptop has a hybrid graphics setup. Automatic hybrid video support is in development, Microsoft says.

The technology relies on GPU-agnostic algorithms. Microsoft had to add a DirectX 12 pipeline to Google's Chromium engine (which normally uses DirectX 11) so that its machine learning framework can interact with the browser. Compression helps keep the computational load relatively light.

Video Super Resolution is only available to a handful of Edge Canary users at the moment, but should come to more users in the "coming weeks," the company adds. It also plans to widen the list of supported GPUs, so don't be disheartened if your hardware isn't initially compatible. Just be patient if you aren't willing to use experimental software — it'll likely take a while before betas and polished versions support the feature.